THE BIGGEST TOAD IN THE PUDDLE Avarice VS Goodness

The story of THE BIGGEST TOAD IN THE  PUDDLE takes place in a small village.

THE BIGGEST TOAD IN THE PUDDLE Avarice VS Goodness

The films of director Ho Wi Ding are generally described as "slim but likeable" - gentle character studies with either an ironic flavour (Pinoy Sunday, about two Filipinos carrying a sofa through Taipei) or an intimate feel (My Elder Brother in Taiwan, centred on a Cross-Straits family reunion). In the space of those first two features, Ho evolved from being an episodic director with a background in shorts to one who could handle larger story spans. In his third feature, The Biggest Toad in the Puddle, the Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based film-maker takes another step forwards: it\'s  his first with an overtly satirical edge, focusing on an indecisive but honest worker whose life is transformed by a discovery on some land he\'s been given.

Though the film is set in a tiny community in Hebei province - the fictional Toad Village - it could be set, like any good allegory, in any village anywhere. Tian Sheng is a middle-aged miner who\'s just been laid off and is owed three months\' wages by the mine\'s boss; when he\'s given a plot of land by the local government, in compensation for a motorway that will be built near the village, he finds a hot spring under it that could make him rich. Suddenly everybody - from his wife\'s cousin to the local mine boss - wants to be his friend, and help him build a resort that will transform not only his life but also that of the whole community.

As a satire on human greed and cupidity, the movie is not especially original; but the performances by the whole cast - and Ho\'s self-effacing direction of them - give it an attractive lack of cynicism: these people, Ho seemes to say, may be greedy but you can\'t help liking them despite their faults. As the hapless and hopeless Tian, character actor and stand-up comic Fan Lei, 41, anchors the film with a self-effacing performance, while others, like TV actors Wang Xiaoxi as the self-important village head  and Yang Jinger as Tiansheng\'s impressionable wife, supply humour in varying quantities.

Even though the film takes place in a village, Toad  has a much bigger feel than Ho\'s previous two features. This is partly due to it being set on the bigger stage: the characters are more expansive, and there\'s a sense of them being just a tiny part of a huge social fabric that we never see. But despite all that, Ho hasn\'t lost his gift for character observation and his basically benign view of human nature.